Know yourself to improve yourself 👨‍🎨 #84

Do you know what your role is? Understanding that can help you decide on the next step. It did for me.

For the past four years, I’ve been a user experience designer. I figured out that this is what I wanted to do, as I got a kick out of seeing people experience websites and apps and loved learning about removing subjectivity from design and creating a loop of building, measuring and learning. It made sense to me.

It hasn’t always been the case. Around 10 years ago I couldn’t decide whether to be a video editor or a web designer. I went between the two for a few years, finally just making a decision to can the video production side of things. Making that decision freed me up to embrace design deeper and start learning all the skills needed to level up to get better.

Just making that decision stopped the procrastination and uncertainty.

The same thing can be applied to product design. You could discuss a multitude of features or design changes, but it gets you nowhere fast. Making a decision and executing gets you to the next thing. Even if you find out it was the wrong decision, you’ve found out in much less time by just trying it out.

Jared Spool challenged the product team with this statement: “I want you to come up with ways we could make the design much worse.” Great article that really puts a spin for designing for users. Also “As they’re doing this simple, fun exercise, they are focusing on the users.” I try this - turning meetings into workshops and getting people to collaborate rather than listen and discuss.

Focusing on causality, anxieties, and motivations of users is called Jobs To Be Done. Job Stories help you apply this when you design features, UI, and UX. I’ve had a real crash course on job stories these past few weeks, but I’m finding them a valuable tool to design against.

Tubik Studio share the principles and strategies for selling online, but also understanding the role of design in eCommerce. “Thoroughly thought-out logic and transitions, simple and clear microinteractions, fast feedback from the system, attractive product presentation, easy payment flow and plenty of other details can directly influence increasing profits for the business involved in such a popular e-commerce game”

Structure your retrospectives with Trello. I’ve been using Trello much more recently - from working through agenda items in meetings to prioritising tasks. Some clients have asked “what is that - I want to use that.” Here, Hanno share how they conduct weekly team hangouts with this awesome productivity app.